Power shutoffs could prevent wildfires, but at what cost to the elderly and disabled?
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Cecilia Santillano faced a difficult decision last year before the power went out in her Simi Valley neighborhood: Ignore her monthly bills and buy a generator, or hope the batteries on her husband's ventilators would outlast the next outage.
"If I didn't have the generator and there was no power and no sign of it getting turned on, George could start passing away," said Santillano, whose husband suffers from a rare autoimmune disease and is bound to a wheelchair. "They are expensive and I didn't want to buy it, but I'd rather be safe."
The power outage Santillano endured wasn't related to preventing wildfires - she said it was caused by Southern California Edison maintenance. But outages like hers could become more commonplace and prolonged as California utility companies expand their use of intentional electricity shutoffs to prevent power lines from sparking wildfires.
Local leaders and public health workers fear that hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Californians, such as Santillano, could find themselves in increasingly dire situations. They also acknowledge there are wrenching trade-offs.
"This is a really tough situation," said Karen Relucio, a
